After I finished my last post, Puzzling Billboards, I ran across what might be an even better example of a billboard that cleverly invokes the “aha!” phenomenon and possibly the neuromarketing reward mechanism I described in Marketing to the Infovore. While I didn’t have my camera handy as I zoomed by it, the concept of the billboard was simple enough to reproduce here: […]

In past posts like Puzzles Boost Brand Recognition and Marketing to the Infovore, I discussed how letting a viewer solve a little puzzle might provide a little reward in the brain and help the viewer remember the product or the brand. My post about Schick’s shrubbery trimmer got me thinking about puzzle marketing again, and brought to mind what would seem to be the most unlikely venue for confronting a customer with a puzzle: billboards.

The classic advice for billboard design is to keep it minimal. As drivers flash by in their cars, they don’t have time to read text, and, of course, the more text you put on the billboard the smaller the type size must be. The idea of incorporating enough of a puzzle to produce any kind of “aha!” reaction seems outlandish. But is it? Check out these billboards I spotted in Indiana recently: […]

When the brain decodes a puzzle, even a simple one, there’s a little reward. Marketers have sometimes used this to good effect – see Puzzles Boost Brand Recognition and Marketing to the Infovore. Watch this commercial from Schick for its Quattro TrimStyle for Women razor: […]